Nowadays, old men and women are very common and the extremes of both good and evil are spared them. Per haps that's just as well.
One might suppose, what with the steady rise in life expectancy in the more advanced portions of the globe, that we need merely hold on another century to find men routinely living a century and a half. Unfortunately, this is not so. Unless there is a remarkable biological break through in geriatrics, we have gone just about as far as we can go in raising, the life expectancy.
I once read an allegory that has haunted me all my adult life. I can't repeat it word for word; I wish I could. But it goes something like this. Death is an archer and life is a bridge. Children begin to cross the bridge gaily, skipping along and growing older, while Death shoots at them. Ms aim is miserable at first, and only an occasional child is transfixed and falls off the bridge into the cloud-enshrouded mists below. But as the crowd moves farther along, Death's aim improves and the numbers thin. Finally, when Death aiins at the aged who totter nearly to the end of the bridge, his aim is perfect and he never misses. And not one man ever gets across the bridge to see what lies on the other side.
This remains true despite all the advances in social struc ture and medical science throughout history. Death's aim has worsened through early and middle life, but those last perfectly aimed arrows are the arrows of old age, and even now they never miss. All we have done to wipe out war, famine, and disease has been to allow more people the chance of experiencing old age. When life expectancy was
35, perhaps one in a hundred reached old age; nowadays nearly half the population reaches it-but it is the same old old age. Death gets us all, and with every scrap of his ancient efficiency.
In short, putting life expectancy to one side, there is a "specific age" which is our most common time of death from inside, without any outside push at all; the age at which we would die even if we avoided accident, escaped disease, and took every care of ourselves.
Three thousand years ago, the psalmist testified as to the specific age of man (Ps. 90:10), saying: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut -off, and we fly away."
I And so it is today; three millennia of civilization and three centuries of science have not changed it. The com monest time of death by old age lies between 70 and 80.
But that is just the commonest time. We don't all die on our 75th birthday; some of us do better, and it is un doubtedly the hope of each one of us that we ourselves, personally, will be one of those who will do better. So what we have our eye on is not the specific age but the maximum age we can reach.
Every species of multicellular creature has a specific age and a maximum age; and of the species that have been studied to any degree at all, the maximum age would seem to be between 50 and 100 per cent longer than the specific age. Thus, the maximum age for man is considered to be about II S.
There have been reports of older men, to be sure. The most famous is the case of Thomas Parr ("Old Parr"), who was supposed to have been born in 1481 in England and to have died in 1635 at the age of 154. The claim is not believed to be authentic (some think it was a put-up job involving three generations of the Parr family), nor are any other claims of the sort. The Soviet Union reports numerous centenarians in the Caucasus, but all were born in a region and at a time when records were not kept. The old man's age rests only upon his own word, therefore, and ancients are notorious for a tendency to lengthen their years. Indeed, we can make it a rule, almost, that the poorer the recording of vital statistics in a particular region, the older the centenarians claim to be.
In 1948, an English woman named Isabella Shepheard died at the reported age of 115. She was the last survivo 'r, within the British Isles, from the period before the com pulsory registration of births, so one couldn't be certain to the year. Still, she could not have been younger by more than a couple of years. In 1814, a French Canadian named Pieffe Joubert died and he, apparently, had reliable records to show that he was bom in 1701, so that he died at 113.
Let's accept 115 as man's maximum age, then, and ask whether we have a good reason to complain about this.
How does the figure stack up against maximum ages for other types of living organisms? if we compare plants with animals, there is no question that plants bear off the palm of victory. Not all plants generally, to be sure. To quote the Bible again (Ps. 103:
15-16), "As for man his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more."
This is a spine-tingling simile representing the evanes cence of human life, but what if the psalmist had said that as for man. his days are as the oak tree; or better still, as the giant sequoia? Specimens of the latter are believed to be over three thousand years old, and no maximum age is known for them.
However, I don't suppose any of us wants long life at the cost of being a tree. Trees live long, but they live slowly, passively, and in terribly, terribly dull fashion. Let's see what we can do with animals.
Very simple animals do surprisingly well and there are reports of sea-anemones, corals, and such-like creatures passing the half-century mark, and even some tales (not very reliable) of centenarians among them. Among more elaborate 'invertebrates, lobsters may reach an age of 50 and clams one of 30. But I think we can pass invertebrates, too. There is no reliable tale of a complex invertebrate liv ing to be 100 and even if giant squids, let us say, did so, we don't want to be giant squids.
What about vertebrates? Here we have legends, par ticularly about fish. Some tell us that fish never grow old but live and grow forever, not dying till they are killed. In dividual fish are reported with ages of several centuries.
Unfortunately, none of this can be confirmed. The oldest age reported for a fish by a reputable observer is that of a lake sturgeon which is supposed to be well over a century old, going by a count of the rings on the spiny ray of its pectoral fin.
Among amphibia the record holder is the giant sala mander, which may reach an age of 50. Reptiles are better.
Snakes ma reach an aoe of 30 and crocodiles may attain y t,
60, but it is the turtles that hold the record for the animal kingdom. Even small turtles may reach the century mark, and at least one larger turtle is known, with reasonable certainty, to have lived 152 years. It may be that the large Galapagos turtles can attain an age of 200.
But then turtles live slowly and dully, too. Not as slowly as plants, but too slowly for us. In fact, there are only two classes of living creatures that live intensely and at peak level at all times, thanks to their warm blood, and these are the birds and the mammals. (Some mammals cheat a little and hibernate through the winter and probably ex tend their life span in that nianner.) We might envv a tiger or an eagle if they. lived a long, long time and even
— as the shades of old age closed in-wish we could trade places with them. But do they live a long, long time?
Of the two classes, birds on the whole do rather better than mammals as far as maximum age is concerned. A pigeon can live as long as a lion and a herring gull as long as a hippopotamus. In fact, we have long-life legends about some birds, such as parrots and swans, which are supposed to pass the century mark with ease.
Any devotee of the Dr. Dolittle stories (weren't you?) must remember Polynesia, the parrot, who was in her third century. Then there is Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about that mythical character who was granted immortality but, through an oversight, not freed from the incubus of old age so that he grew older and older and was finally, out of pity, turned into a grasshopper. Tennyson has him lament that death comes to all but him. He begins by pointing out that men and the plants of the field die, and his fourth line is an early climax, going, "And after many a summer dies the swan." In 1939, Aldous Huxley used the line as a title for a book that dealt with the striving for physical im mortalit y